Life is stressful and life is wonderful
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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's tip is that life is stressful and life is wonderful. There is no contradiction here. Rather than impose a single narrative on life, we can acknowledge both truths and see both kinds of moments for what they are. Today's tip, like several others this week, comes from my book, I Know How She Does It, which is 10 years old this month.

For this book, I studied 1,001 days in the lives of women who had big jobs and who also had kids at home to see what life really looked like. I found that in the 168 hours of a week, there is plenty of time to work, enjoy family time, sleep, exercise, read, see friends, and so forth. Lots of people do, in fact, have it all.

Of course, there were stressful moments too. Any 168 hours has some highs and lows. But I think it is important to zoom out and see both the good moments and the bad moments together, without deciding that the bad needs to define everything. To illustrate this, in the book I told the story of a summer day trip to the Jersey Shore. If I wanted to point to evidence that this trip was a disaster, I could.

We got stuck in traffic on the way there, which turned a 90-minute trip into a four-hour one. This is really fun when you are pregnant, as I was at the time, and not near any bathrooms. On the way home, my two-year-old daughter lost her pacifier, so she screamed for much of the trip. And my four-year-old son got sick, so he was vomiting most of the way home. Good times. But those were not the only things that happened on this day trip to the beach.

I had a really good lunch. The beach was beautiful. Even on the trip home, there were a few blessed moments when no one was screaming or throwing up. I didn't have to tell the story of this beach trip as a disaster because it wasn't all a disaster. It had both its ups and its downs. Life is stressful and life is wonderful. What would change if you consciously used that language?

What if you really leaned into that word and? I worked late on Monday. And I had a really lovely family dinner on Tuesday. The baby woke up three times during the night on Thursday. And I had an amazing lunch with colleagues. The flight to Hawaii felt endless with small kids. And the Hawaii landscape is just stunning. I'm so glad I saw it. All these things can be simultaneously true.

So why fret if one is more true than the other? Happiness comes from seeing the good moments, even if there are rough ones happening as well. Either or stories, on the other hand, just tend to limit our lives. In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening. And here's to making the most of our time.

Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at laura at lauravandercam.com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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